ROS is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.

Setup Notes

With fuerte, there ROS is split into two levels. The core libraries are installed into the system folders (/opt/ros/fuerte) while the higher-level stacks and packages are installed in the user folders.

The Arch-specific install page lists the packages (official and AUR) that you will need to install for a full setup.

ros-coreAUR, available in the AUR, is the package for the core libraries.